Customer experience

Do your customers take delight in their interactions with you? Do you provide them with memorable experiences? Do you help them achieve their goals efficiently and effectively? Does the customer experience reflect your brand values? Does it drive retention and customer advocacy? Or does it leave customers feeling cold about you?

It is no longer sufficient to have a web precence. Usability and good design are just hygiene factors. A compelling customer experience differentiates the wheat from the chaff. Good words though, how is it done? Start thinking about the customer - thier role, create personas. Then their goals. What do they want? What are the customer journeys? Here's some links to get you thinking...

Customer experience

Note that many of these are now old and may not work

sjmercury.com
The Web has become a loud, ugly environment filled with blinking lights, scrolling text and ads, ads, ads.

infoworld.com
Good links

useit.com
Deals with the case of an author who switched affiliates from Amazon and
lost all(?) sales through referrals.

infoworld.com
Good customer service on the Web makes your customers come back

infoworld.com
To create a community, look to a good platform and examine the needs of
your customers

editorandpublisher.com
Contrary to print where visuals make readers' eyes linger, online text is more compelling. 'One of its principle findings is that news Web site users tend to look first at and look most intently at text, glossing over photos and images in search of meaningful textual information. That's a reverse of reader behavior in print'

neuromedia.com
To talk to an AI customer rep. Reasonably impressive....

zdnet.com
12 aspects of the online shopping experience and 29 examples of sites that execute these aspects well -- or poorly.

thestandard.com
Forbes.com brings us two examples of how airing your thoughts about a product, or just plain venting your spleen, is a popular pastime on the Web.

personalization.com
An excellent source for information and analysis on all aspects of web site personalization.

zdnet.com
The best and worst in e-commerce design. Best Practices gives you examples of what works, what doesn't and why.

gomez.com
Unparalleled view of online customer experience by combining industry specific expertise, a thoroughly objective and extensive Internet evaluation methodology, and high-quality community ratings and reviews of online businesses'. more to the point, includes customer experience metrics, usability etc.